Transferring data from an old laptop HD?

Question

Hello internet. I have a kind of tech-y problem.

To begin with, I'm trying to transfer a big hunk of data from some old laptop hard drives.

My brother and I both had a pair of crap Toshiba laptops, circa 2005 or so. By now, they're both trashed. BUT, the hard drives have been salvaged. I know enough to hook them up to this current Desktop, thankfully. Both use XP Home Edition SP2, as does this desktop.

Anyways, if I boot from the desktop, it denies me access. "F:\Documents and Settings\Owner is not accessible. Access is denied." is the message I get. I CAN access the Program Files, but I also want to access the Owner file. So, I tried booting from the hard drive itself. Login screen, put in password, blah-blah, but it wants me to re-activate Windows.

Obviously I don't want to pay to activate hard drives I'm only going to strip the data from. There's an option to start IE for some help, which I select, and I can then type "C:\" in the address bar, and it boots Explorer for about 45 seconds, before it just closes out.(Explorer, not IE. I can re-do this indefinitely as far as I know.) Keeps me logged in as long as I don't close out of the "Activate Windows" application. If I boot up a program that's not directly part of Windows, I can keep it running. (I'm actually running Firefox from the old hard drive right now to type this to you guys.) I can even run most services. (Things like Disk Defrag and any of the Administrator Tools.)

But none of this allows me to use the basic stuff. It's pretty much like what you'd see if you closed "explorer.exe" with the Task Manager. I can't use the Task Manager though, nor my CD drive, and 45 seconds isn't anywhere near long enough to transfer 50 gigs of data from this hard drive to the newer one.

So, to reiterate, I need to get the data from this hard drive onto the newer one. No access to it from the new one, and Explorer doesn't run for very long on the old one. I can run applications, but no basic UI. No command prompt either, which sucks.

Oh, on that note, I CAN still install and run programs. So if there's something specific I need to download to handle this, fire away.

E-mail is [e-mail], Yahoo Messenger ID is skrulz_the_capricious if there's any information at all that I missed.

Thank you all in advance!

Answer 1

download and burn a live CD distribution of LINUX or any other Rescue CD. (like UBCD).



boot from it and you can do all the forensics you need on that HDD!



you could also consider using an external hard drive case (connected through USB) to hook the laptop's drive to the rescuing PC.

Answer 2

The old drive could be installed into a 2nd system, as the 'slave', which would then not even require the OS to boot (form the slave).

The drive can then be 'explored' and files extracted to the 'master' HDD.

Requires a 2 HDD, IDE cable and jumper to adapt SATA > IDE ; Google for sources on the jumper. About $20-30 US.

Answer 3

attempt to attach this this laptop's HDD to a private pc. and Boot from it if it heaving OS, provide consumer call and password (if u don't be conscious of use ERD Disk to interrupt), then reproduction information,, if it would not artwork attempt to repeat from secure mode(press F8 collectively as booting), its common to repeat..

Answer 4

Best thing I can suggest is to go to Best Buy. they have software now specifically for transferring data from hard drives.